


In the rest of the room

by karszi



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: Angst and Humor, Bathing/Washing, It's about the tenderness, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-10
Updated: 2019-06-10
Packaged: 2020-04-24 04:01:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19165402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/karszi/pseuds/karszi
Summary: Here in the halls of Castle Black, there are no ghosts but the ghosts of former habits, which make for rather dull hauntings more often than not.





	In the rest of the room

**Author's Note:**

> Mostly book canon since show canon Edd has said maybe 50 cumulative words and I have no idea how to write him yet. (Assumes show canon ages though! No underage Jon in this house!) Haven't read ADWD in years, apologies in advance for any inaccuracies.
> 
> Title is from "To Be Alone With You" by Sufjan Stevens because I am nothing if not a clown.

During his brief respite from Long Barrow, Edd finds himself enjoying wandering the halls in the earliest hours of the morning. Indeed, he can scarcely think of a better set of halls to wander, with the possible exception of those at the crumbling ruins of the Nightfort. Here in the halls of Castle Black, there are no ghosts but the ghosts of former habits, which make for rather dull hauntings more often than not. He finds himself indulging one particularly tempting spirit when he passes the Lord Commander’s door and finds the light of one particularly long-suffering candle jumping out from beneath it.

He raps lightly at the door in warning and opens it a crack, just enough to get a good view of the room. 

Jon is at his desk, leaned over a pile of papers with his gaze fixed on whatever bleakness lies out the window. He raises a brow when he sees Edd’s beak of a nose poked in through his doorway but says nothing.

“It would be very remiss of me in my stewardly duties not to advise you to get some rest, m’lord. I don’t claim to be an expert, but brooding is often just as effective in daylight.”

“Your stewardly duties? You haven’t been my steward for a long time now. And I don’t recall doing the same when I served Lord Mormont.”

“Times are changing, I’m afraid.” Edd sighs loudly, taking that as his cue to enter the room fully. “Must have revised the roster right after you left with the Halfhand. The things we do for duty and all that.”

Jon is silent for a long while. Edd fears he’s hit a nerve until he stands abruptly from his desk and takes his gloves in hand. He does not look him in the eye when he speaks.

“Right as always, Edd. I think I could use a good wash before I turn in. Join me at the bathhouse?” 

“No, thank you. You know, I do actually prefer my hair like this. A little grease goes a long way in keeping any unwanted tagalongs away. The spearwives, for one. And the lice too, I suppose.”  

“I don’t think the spearwives need any help keeping away from you, Edd.” Jon still doesn’t meet his gaze, but he is smiling as he passes. It’s the first smile he’s gotten out of him the whole day, but he supposes he should count himself lucky. Often enough these days there are none at all. He should not have been gone for so long, he thinks, but then again he was sent away, and couldn’t have done much to change the Lord Commander’s mind.

Jon exits the solar at a brisk pace. Edd follows in spite of himself.

*

The baths at Castle Black have not the natural wonder of the great heated springs of Winterfell nor the bracing freshness of the meltwater rivers of the Vale. The room is small enough to keep heated but is seldom crowded, as the water is never what you could call warm and body heat below the Wall is a far more precious commodity than cleanliness. It is all the same to Edd, who bathed from a rusted bucket until he was fifteen and saved every sliver of soap to wash his ailing mother’s hair. 

Three black brothers are sat clothed by the great hearth at the center of the far wall, passing a wineskin between them. Edd recognizes two of them, saw them cheering just as loud as Sam and Grenn and Pyp and the rest when the election was announced. One was with him for the mutiny at Craster’s Keep. He doesn’t recall the man’s name, but those are the bonds of brotherhood for you. Jon gives them a look and they depart without a word, nodding good-naturedly at the pair of them.

Jon starts to disrobe the moment the door is shut. Edd looks away and tugs at his gloves.

“A clever trick. Think you could clear out the common hall like that? Brother Garrett always gets to the last of the horseradish before I’m even down the stairs, the old bastard. You’d think a man at his age has had his fill of sauced and seasoned meats, might as well leave something behind for those with less life experience and be resigned to his bland boiled beef in peace. Though he is a large man, and it’ll take sterner stuff than that glare to cow him. Begging your pardon m’lord, but I just don’t know if your face is up to the job.”

“Too pretty?”  

When Edd looks up from unlacing his vambraces, Jon has already stripped off his breeches, facing Edd naked as the day he was born with a spark of humor in his eyes, which is entirely unfair. Edd swallows. He grasps at the ties to his doublet and fights to keep his tone appropriately unbothered. Damn the cold for stiff and clumsy fingers, and bless it for other reasons.

“Nay, too long. That is why you and I always got on so well, I suspect. Mules of a feather flock together? Is that how the saying goes?” 

There is no dignified way to get out of one’s trousers unless one’s name is Satin Flowers, so Edd settles on waiting for Jon to turn around and step into the water before he stumbles out of his own and slips in behind him. 

*

Edd remembers himself halfway through getting a good lather into his hair with some awful lye-heavy wedge of soap. His scalp tingles unpleasantly. “What in the seven hells are we doing down here?”

Jon stares at him like his brain has finally frozen solid between his ears. The look is so familiar that he half expects to find it to be true one day. 

“Getting clean.”

“Getting cold, more like,” he mutters, raising a brow.

“Now that kind of attitude towards hygiene is exactly why the spearwives want nothing to do with you.”

Edd snorts. “Show me a bathed spearwife and I’ll show you a drowned woman, m’lord.”

“You might be surprised,” he says with some approximation of a knowing smile. What he seems to know about the bathing habits of wildling women, Edd doesn’t ever want to find out. 

He sets the soap down and runs wet fingers through his hair to rinse out the suds, wincing when it burns against his already inflamed hands. Jon has long since finished, the efficient bastard, and has come up from behind Edd and sat down close to him at some point in his great battle with himself to get clean. Edd feels a gentle hand on his shoulder.

“Here, let me.”

He takes a moment to process this turn of events. 

“Careful now. I wouldn’t, if I were you. Were he still here I would say Pyp has been assigned soap duty again; the stuff is full of lye.”

“Then lean back, so it doesn’t get in your eyes." 

Edd is sure that there is a clever response to that, but his mind is having trouble coming up with it. He obeys, sinking in his seat until the tips of his ears touch the water. He is not a large man; it is not a long way to go. That is not to say that it is a comfortable position, as it is not, not least of all because his head is all but resting in the lap of the Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch while said Lord Commander of the Night’s Watch tenderly combs his hair clean in the frigid water.

“Does Satin let you wash his hair like this?” 

Jon laughs, the great dimwit, probably somehow mistaking his tone for teasing. “If he did I expect I’d spend half my time in the bathhouse and the rest trying to wash my hands of all those oils and perfumes.”

“I’m not him.” 

The gentle fingers in his hair still abruptly. “I know that.” He sounds deeply bemused. Edd can only imagine what his face looks like.

“I would hope so. I’m not nearly tall or good-smelling enough, though I do think there is something to be said for men of short stature. Do you find that they live just a little longer? Perhaps we are just a harder target to hit.”

“What’s gotten into you, Edd?”

Edd turns and gives him a hard look. “Nothing. Absolutely nothing but for a bowl of especially bland porridge late this morning at breakfast, and perhaps a little overmuch lye under my fingernails,” he says with as much dry levity as he can muster. “Anything special gotten into you lately?”

“What?” 

It is comforting, in a way, to find that the man is as dense as he ever was. Some things never change.

“Jon.” Edd doesn’t think himself capable of being a truly serious man, so this he tries to say with as much gloom as he can muster to compensate. It all feels a bit tragic.

Jon sighs and smiles wryly. “I just wanted some peace and quiet. I thought, down here…”

Edd interrupts him with a disbelieving huff. “You wanted peace and quiet, and you brought me along? Pardon me for saying so, but I’m afraid you picked the wrong man for the job, m’lord.”

Jon frowns. “I haven’t. True enough you never shut your mouth,” and here he pauses, looking thoughtful. And here Edd holds his breath because he feels something change in the air, turning his head closer to Jon like they are thirteen and exchanging secrets in the dirt behind the neighbor’s old cowshed. And here Jon gives him another smile, looking oddly conspiratorial and softer, sadder than before. “But you bring peace to me, Edd. Like no one else.”

And here Edd kisses him. 

Edd has had a scant few kisses before, and none so sweet as this one. He had once kissed Samwell on his unwashed and unshaven cheek for saving him the last serving of stewed pears, which had not been sweet at all but rather greasy and itchy. The cheek, not the pears. Those had been fine. Perhaps a bit underdone. 

And so Edd really has to kiss him, doesn’t have much choice to do otherwise, if one really thinks about it. So he kisses him here, in the bathhouse, on his painfully genuine open-mouth smile, and he puts his hands here, on his hips, in his hair, lays them gently on his face even when his stubble rubs like needles against Edd’s raw and ruddy palms, smooths his thumbs against the overworried edges of his Lord Commander’s brows. He digs his fingers in a little, just enough to let Jon know he is there. He is beginning to worry Jon really doesn’t know he is there after all. Edd is not incredibly experienced in these matters, but he believes that both parties are generally meant to be rather engaged, and Jon is still beneath his hands like a stone. He pulls back with a sudden shock of mortification.

“Sorry. Fuck, sorry. Gods, Jon, I’m sorry, I didn’t think–”

“Edd,” Jon says. Soft, like a warning or a plea.

Edd looks up at him and Jon looks down at Edd’s hands, fallen to his sides in his panic. He draws one up out of the water in his own and worries at it carefully, palm up, running his thumb across his knuckles. Edd can feel every crease and callus, and it hurts his lightly burned skin marginally less than it hurts his heart. Jon presses the hand up against his chest and Edd has to draw in close, puts those soft lips at the corner of his mouth and Edd parts his own.

“Please stop talking for just a moment.”

And so he does.

*

They dress hastily against the cold. 

Edd swears up a storm when they exit through the bathhouse doors into the frozen courtyard, deserted at such an early hour, and Jon puts an arm around him and leaves it there until they reach his chambers.

Edd’s legs could be made of lead or cotton and he would scarcely realize. He falls onto the furs with his boots still on and Jon lies next to him, taking Edd’s hands in his own as he is evidently so inclined to do. He can’t say that he minds.

“I never should have sent you away, Edd. I wish you would stay here, at Castle Black.”  

Edd raises a brow.

“With me,” Jon adds, helpfully. “Some other steward can take the spearwives back. We have no shortage of them.” They did seem to have a bit of a shortage of them, but Edd supposes he can see his point.

“I leave tomorrow at my lord’s command.”

“And if I command otherwise?”

“Oh, well, if m’lord commands it,” Edd sighs, sounding put upon, “then I figure that’s all right. But it will be such a shame to leave Long Barrow behind. I believe those spearwives were beginning to take a liking to me.”

Jon laughs, long and light, and Edd follows in spite of himself.

 

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on tumblr @karszi!


End file.
